Antibodies for cancer treatment, which act on cancer cells, would be effective for treatment of cancers that are not easily treated with conventional anticancer agents (“sites that are not easily treated with conventional anticancer agents” or “cancers that are not easily treated with conventional anticancer agents”) and in reducing the adverse effects of such therapies. Accordingly, increase in kind and improvement in quality of cancer-specific therapeutic antibodies would lead to more favorable therapeutic results in cancer therapy. For that purpose, there is a need to further study on proteins expressed specifically in cancers.
A monoclonal antibody specifically binding to human epithelial cell adhesion molecule (EpCAM), one of such proteins, was disclosed (see Patent Document 1).
EpCAM is a cell adhesion molecule expressed at a very low level on the tip of epithelial cell surface but at high rate on the epithelial tumor cell. Accordingly, EpCAM can be used as a tumor-specific marker. The monoclonal antibody, which binds to EpCAM specifically, can be used, for example, for drug delivery.
A cell adhesion molecule is a molecule governing adhesion between cells or between cell and cytoskeleton. The history goes back to 1976 A.D., when Edelman et al. studied a neural cell adhesion molecule.
In past studies, the cell adhesion molecules are divided, based on the size, into four groups: integrins, cadherins, selecting, and immunoglobulin superfamily (IgSF).
The cell adhesion molecules, which are mostly molecules expressed specifically in cancer cells, studied intensively recently. A molecule particularly attracting attention is CD166.
CD166 is a cell adhesion molecule belonging to the immunoglobulin superfamily. Such a molecule has an important role in development of nervous system and is expressed in an excess amount in particular kinds of cancer cells. In particular, the molecules are considered to accelerate malignant transformation of cancer cells and metastasis of cancers (see Nonpatent Literatures 1 to 3).
Therefore, the monoclonal antibody to CD166, if present, would be useful for prevent of metastasis and for use as a drug delivery system. Focusing on CD166, the inventors have prepared an anti-CD166 polyclonal antibody and an anti-CD166 monoclonal antibody and used them for detection of CD166 (see Patent Document 2).    Patent Document 1: Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2004-533248    Patent Document 2: Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2005-127754    Nonpatent Literature 1: J. Exp. Med., 181, 2213-2220, (1995)    Nonpatent Literature 2: Am. J. Pathol, 152, 805-813, (1998)    Nonpatent Literature 3: Biochem. Biophys. Res. Cummun., 267, 870-874 (2000)